1. Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure relates generally to determining the capabilities of a printing device.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the field of print processing, it is a challenging task for Independent Software Vendors (also referred to herein as “ISVs”) to provide a consistent user interface for receiving a desired print intent from a user while supporting private settings for the printers of multiple Independent Hardware Vendors (also referred to herein as “IHVs”). The communication between the Windows® print sub system, an IHV's plug-in driver, and an ISV's application causes part of the difficulties, because the communication is done thru indexed based binary DevMode structures (also referred to herein as “DevMode”) and binary DevCaps structures (also referred to herein as “DevCaps”).
Microsoft® introduced a new XML based print schema to address the problems associated with communication between the print subsystem and external applications. The print schema technology uses an XML based public schema to describe printer capabilities, device configurations, and job formatting settings. Applications can use the XML based schema to provide print dialogs to change print settings.
Whenever a user changes a selected option for a setting, the changed setting and the respective option is added to a delta (also referred to herein as “A”) PrintTicket and merged and validated with a specified base PrintTicket to produce a resulting PrintTicket, which is used to get a corresponding resulting PrintCapabilities document. The resulting PrintCapabilities document is then used to re-populate the user interface (also referred to herein as a “UI”).